Journal Club Entry #1

Summary:

The researchers in this study were interested in infant preferences relating to two versions of an unfamiliar children's son--unaccompanied vocal and accompanied vocal. They used the head-turning technique to determine the length of each child's listening to excerpts of a Chinese children's song sung by a female 9-year-old child (because previous studies have shown that children prefer higher pitches and children's voices). They ran an ANOVA for interactions between gender, age (5, 8, and 11 months), and stimulus and found that children of all the age categories preferred the unaccompanied song version.

Discussion:

Overall, the research looked valid. The sample size was large enough and the stimuli were randomized through the conditions. However, the "world music" accompaniment to the accompanied song version may be problematic. I think using uncharacteristic combinations of instruments may introduce another variable. It is not clear how much discriminating ability children have at that age as far as separating genres of music (mostly based on levels of exposure to a variety of music), but varieties of world music each have a set of distinctive holistic qualities, so using bagpipes to accompany a child singing in a Mandarin dialect may sound just as strange to an infant as it would to us.

Other than that, I find the results common sense; children's perceptive capacities are not rrefined, and so extra stimulation would be less enjoyable. However, I would be interested in a study involving mixed world music/ accompanied and unaccompanied version of a song, and synesthetic children at a preschool (if identifiable) and kindergarten age.